Somewhere in Notre Dame's athletic department is a packet of information from Professional Services Group, a West Palm Beach, Fla., business that helps schools find new football coaches. White and many other Division I-A athletic directors know about PSG but choose to do business the old-fashioned way: They ask each other for advice on coaching candidates and then do their own research.

If White had been interested, he would have learned that PSG does background checks on candidates before those coaches interview with an athletic director or search committee.

He would have learned that PSG checks for arrests, lawsuits and liens. He would have learned that PSG checks the accuracy of college transcripts and media-guide biographies as a matter of course. He might have wondered whether DNA testing for coaches was on the horizon.

White would have learned O'Leary didn't letter three times on New Hampshire's football team--or even one time--and he would have learned O'Leary didn't have a master's degree from New York University, as the Georgia Tech coach had asserted. He would have saved himself and Notre Dame a lot of embarrassment and money.

White might still be talking about his wonderful future if he had picked up the phone after firing Bob Davie.

Barry Terranova owns PSG, and he said he feels sorry for White and O'Leary. He calls the Notre Dame mess an "absolute tragedy for everyone associated with the program," which might be overstating things, but he takes these things seriously. One thing Terranova knows for sure is that the Irish didn't have to go through this, though he's not surprised they are.

"I knew this would happen," Terranova said Saturday. "I didn't know how, but I knew somewhere, somehow it would happen to some school. I knew that something would come back to bite somebody.

"The manner in which football coaches are chosen is absolutely an anachronism. Can you imagine a chairman of the board of directors calling another chairman at another corporation and saying, `Do you know any chief financial officers we should hire?' This is a multimillion-dollar industry, and decisions are being made without a degree of professionalism or a search process that is refined. This is basic business."

When Pete Carroll took the Southern Cal job last year, he hired PSG to help him fill his staff. Texas Tech hired PSG to help it find a head coach, and that's how the Red Raiders wound up with Mike Leach.

"You're talking about a lot of money when it comes to hiring a new coach," Leach said. "For a school the investment is astronomical, in terms of money and the school's reputation. If Barry had been involved, Notre Dame would have had more information on candidates than it ever wanted. If Barry is involved, [the O'Leary crisis] doesn't happen."

My sources tell me White was behind closed doors Saturday with his top advisers: John DeLorean, Michael Dukakis and Gen. Custer. Now that the pedal is off the metal and White has had some patience slapped into him, he needs to ditch the process that got him to this particular netherworld. It's obvious he needs assistance. This isn't an infomercial for PSG; it's a primal scream aimed at waking White from his deep slumber.

Get some help, Kevin. You need to make sure Notre Dame's next head coach is as clean as Ted Washington's plate.

I chided the Bears earlier this year for needing a consulting firm to find Tampa Bay's Jerry Angelo, who only had been working in the NFC Central for about 247 years. But the stakes were so much higher in the Notre Dame situation that White should have used every resource at his disposal.

Notre Dame has just ensured that PSG will get a lot of business from schools across the country, but right now the Irish need to find a headhunter and a private detective.

"My heart goes out to Notre Dame," Terranova said. "It's unfortunate what happened to them, but it's absolutely predictable given the current nature of how searches are done now. And it was absolutely avoidable."